It took an embarrassing amount of time to get myself out from under all the rocks and I apologised to the others profusely. I’m taking away from their precious training time with my idiocy, after all!

We push down to the next layer, bypass the demon city there and the three pets continue their hunting activities on the plains while I focus on using the greater space to run my tests with a little more safely.

Turns out my dash Skill needs a minimum of a hundred metres room when I’m charging it up with my Altar. At least, that remains the case until I get a better handle on it, I can’t seem to accurately judge the distance or control how far I travel when I’m moving with that much juice.

Further chomp testing yields similar results as before. Essentially, an Altar boosted Void Chomp is completely off the chain, so out of control that it and control have never been seen together in the same room. The destructive power is… rather intimidating. When compared to the normal, unempowered Void Chomp, the result is more than twice as devastating in terms of the area. It’s difficult to tell what sort of effect there is to damage, the rock doesn’t exactly do a great job resisting the attack.

It’s stronger, how much, I can’t really tell.

With the basic physical Skills tested, I move on and try to use my spells. Not getting crazy about it, no Gravity Bombs or the like, at least not yet, but I fling out a few firebolts to see what happens. Unempowered, they’re not overly impressive, but when I attempt to use the Altar, I’m delighted to find that the energy floods out one again, beefing up the spell to a much more impressive version of itself.

Which still isn’t much, it’s just a firebolt after all.

Even so, this is progress! I run through a few other spells, testing how much energy is used and what sort of effect I see from the influence of the Altar.

The amount of Will consumed seems to be roughly commensurate with the amount of mana contained in the spell. Which makes sense, I suppose. Basically, the Altar tips in an equal amount to whatever Spell or Skill I’m activating, which means the beefier the attack, the more it gets beefed.

That explains why the Void Chomp experiences such a dramatic upgrade.

I shudder to think what might happen with I fire off a full power Gravity Bomb. Not likely to be testing that any time soon.

I can kind of think of the Altar as making my Skills and Spells act like they’re one rank higher than they already are. I’m not certain if that’s an exact estimate, but it feels like a simple way to understand what is happening to my abilities.

As my three friends keep hunting, racking up experience, I continue to test my abilities and chow down on the Biomass. I’ll need to mutate the Altar at some point soon, along with everything else I have. It’ll be easy to get my body fully mutated before I next evolve, but there’s no point in lollygagging and taking it slow, I’ll pack in the food now and mutate as soon as I can.

If I’m going to taking on a series of monsters an entire tier higher than I am, I’ll need to make sure I have every advantage squared away. Those are the most dangerous battles and minimising the risks is obviously the smarter strategy.

Overall, we stay out for a couple of days, which isn’t enough to make much of a dent in the experience needed for Crinis, Tiny and Invidia, but every bit of progress is good.

It’s quite eye opening really. I’ve reflected on this before, but trying to get three separate pets to reach tier seven is an incredible resource sink. Splitting the cores between us, we go through a fortune in precious gems without scratching the surface of what’s required to max out our cores. Then the experience….

Level one hundred and sixty is no joke! The sheer amount of hunting that needs to be done to reach that kind of level is absurdly high. To create a single tier seven pet, you could raise an army up to tier four.

I can see why it really isn’t worth it for most to pursue this path, but I’m determined. I refuse to allow my pets to be weaker than myself! We will rise together, as true equals!

The entire premise of the pets being essentially bonded servants is distasteful to me and I still haven’t given up on eventually finding a way to release them from their bondage.

Obviously Crinis would say that she’d rather remain a pet that be free, but that’s just the obedience compelled by the Master/Pet bond talking. Free, independent monsters! That’s what I want for Crinis, Tiny and Invidia!

I’ll get it one way or another.

As we return, it’s clear that the mana levels have continued to rise across the stratum. The little larvae that coat the floor are giving us a little taste of the chaos to come, writhing and threshing each other with even greater vigour than usual, without ever seeming to run out of fresh spawns.

I’ll need to check in with the troops, see what’s happening on the demon front. If more of our own allies are going rogue, then there’s going to be issues, especially if the stronger demons start to turn against us.

I mean, I’m totally confident I can smoke a tier seven demon like a fresh ham, but I can’t be everywhere at once!

The Colony has just gotten too big for me to protect every single part of it, which means I need to be especially careful where I place myself….